Connected to each other - Chris Gleeson SJ

'Christ has no body now but yours.
 No hands, no feet on earth but yours.'

Last year my work took me to many parts of Queensland and, indeed, Australia—Albany Creek, Upper Coomera, Bundaberg, Gladstone, Rockhampton, Emerald, Longreach, Barcaldine, Mackay, Biloela, Gympie, Hervey Bay, Merrimac, Adelaide, Melbourne, Launceston, Perth, Cairns, Batemans Bay, Toowong, Manly, Ormiston—to mention most of them.

In many places my face was recognised as the chap who writes the editorial for Madonna and it was an opportunity for these people to approach me to express their gratitude for the magazine. It is their life-line to the church.

So often they told me how much they looked forward to its arrival every two months in the post and that it gave them an injection of new life for their faith. It was so gratifying to discover these wonderful Madonna readers and subscribers sprinkled all across Australia—full of faith and sharing this gift across the community.

On one of my rare weekends home last November, a very generous and faithful member of the Ignatian family, Peter Chan, was ordained to the permanent deaconate in his parish of Bracken Ridge. Not only was it a joyous celebration for Peter, Emma and their family, but somehow the rest of us in the congregation on that steamy Saturday were much moved too.

For me there was a particularly tender moment when the choir sang a beautiful rendition of St Teresa’s words: ‘Christ has no body now but yours. No hands, no feet on earth but yours. Yours are the eyes through which he sees. Yours are the hands through which he does good’.

Tender moments are, of course, moments of grace—a sign of God’s love at work in the world around us. Ronald Rolheiser reminds us in Forgotten Among the Lilies that ‘we need to pray by picking up the tender moment and letting its grace soften us. What constitutes the tender moment? Anything in life that helps make us aware of our deep connectedness with each other, of our common struggle, our common wound, our common sin, and our common need for help.’

That tender moment at Peter Chan’s ordination reminded me of St Augustine’s words that he often addressed to people coming to him for Holy Communion: ‘Receive what you are—the Body of Christ’. We are deeply connected as members of the Body of Christ, and this surely must be a source of so much strength to us when we gather to share in celebrating the Eucharist.

That privilege of deep connection also signals great responsibility for us too. Right back in 1976, the General of the Jesuits at that time, Pedro Arrupe, gave a memorable address on ‘Eucharist and Hunger’ where he reminded us:

Wherever there is suffering in the body, wherever members of it are in want or oppressed, we, because we have received the same body and are part of it, must be directly involved. We cannot opt out and say to a brother or sister: ‘I do not need you. I will not help you’.

There is no victory in evasion, as Thomas Merton once wrote.

How can we see and sense the Body of Christ in our world? Henri Nouwen provides us with a very helpful answer in his words from The Road to Peace: ‘No, we cannot see Christ in the world, but only through the Christ in us can we see Christ in the world. The answer reveals that the Christ within us opens our eyes to the Christ among us’.

During the Easter season we seem to focus a good deal on the body. With prudent discipline we indulge in some fasting and abstinence with a view, not to weight loss or making the body more beautiful, but to stretching the heart to make more room for God in our lives.

On Holy Thursday we sit with Jesus at the last supper table as He institutes the Eucharist with those words that constantly rattle the universe: ‘This is my Body … This is my blood’.

The next day we follow at a discreet distance the gruesome figure of Jesus carrying his cross and being crucified like a common criminal on Golgotha. As we watch him dying on the cross, we sense that Jesus has absorbed all the suffering and pain of our world.

We understand more clearly the scene painted by Jewish novelist, Elie Wiesel, writing in Night about a black gallows in the middle of the concentration camp he was in. A young man with the face of an angel is hanged on the gallows with two adults. The latter die right away, but the youngster struggles on the gallows for over half an hour. A man behind Elie asks: ‘Where is God now?’ Elie hears a voice within him answer: ‘Where is he? Here he is—he is hanging here on this gallows’.

To celebrate the 25th anniversary of the Jesuit Refugee Service in 2005, two Australian Jesuits, composer Christopher Willcock and writer Andrew Hamilton, combined their gifts to produce a hauntingly beautiful hymn entitled ‘Who did you see?’ In response to the refrain question ‘Who did you see along the way?’ the third verse has us sing: ‘We saw a woman reaching for her dying son, held back by police, no heart for home. She seemed like one of us’.

As members of the Body of Christ, we are intimately connected to one another. May the Christ within us, whose dying and rising we celebrate at Easter, continually open our eyes to the Christ among us.